Timeliness-
ELECTION 2016
Cruz repudiates Obama, wows Fort Worth crowd
Stockyards pledge to undo president’s legacy pulls 2,000 out of seats.
ByJonathan Tilove jtilove@statesman.com
FORT WORTH — U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz brought an enthusiastic crowd of about 2,000 supporters to their feet Thursday at the Stockyards with his recitation of how he would set about undoing President Barack Obama’s legacy on a very busy first day in the White House.
The crowd never sat down.
It would be a day to rescind “illegal” executive orders, “rip to shreds this catastrophic Iranian nuclear deal,” launch a criminal probe of Planned Parenthood, begin the process of moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and instruct the Justice Department and the IRS that “the persecution of religious liberty ends today,” the Texas Republican said.
“That’s day one,” Cruz said. “There are 365 days in a year, four years in a presidential term, four years in a second term. At the end of the eighth year, there are going to be a lot of newspaper reporters and journalists and editors to check themselves into therapy.”
Presenting his candidacy as a crusade to save America as “the last, best hope for mankind,” Cruz closed his remarks with the declaration, “We are not prepared to go quietly into the night.”
The crowd roared its approval, and then many surged toward the candidate, surrounding him as, one by one, family unit by family unit, he shook hands, signed books and had photos taken.
For Cruz, it was an exhilarating launch to a day of campaigning for president in his home state that would take him to an afternoon Cruz Country Rally in Tyler and a Kingwood Tea Party Freedom Rally in the evening.
Cruz is the man to beat in the March 1 Texas primary, which has the second-largest cache of delegates, behind only California.
The Texas primary is relatively early in the process, coming on the heels of South Carolina’s primary — the fourth contest after the Iowa and Nevada caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.
“I think Ted Cruz is going to win Texas,” said state Rep. Matt Rinaldi, R-Irving, a tea party legislator who opened Thursday’s rally and who fashions himself a lawmaker in Cruz’s uncompromisingly conservative mold. “I think he is going to win in Iowa.”
The swift dominance of Donald Trump in the GOP race has, for the time being, overshadowed Cruz’s capacity to be the most provocative tribune of discontent.
But Cruz has sought from the start to make Trump an ally, not an adversary, and Cruz and Trump — at Cruz’s invitation — will lead what promises to be a huge rally against the Iran nuclear agreement outside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, the day before the Senate votes on it.
Mike Jones, a Glen Rose veterinarian who ran unsuccessfully for state representative and who has started a grassroots committee supporting Cruz’s presidential campaign in Texas, said the New York mogul had successfully unleashed a national discussion on such issues as immigration. In the long run, it is a space that Cruz will more skillfully fill after voters learn that Trump is neither truly a Republican nor a conservative, he said.
“This is the candidate to get enthusiastic about,” an invigorated Jones said after Cruz spoke.
For Cruz, the Texas primary is a bit of an ace in the hole.
It’s a huge and expensive state to campaign in, and Cruz has an on-the-ground political army he built for his Senate campaign and has nurtured ever since.
As of this week, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks said in an email, “We do not have a Texas operation.”
“I think when Donald Trump comes to Texas, he is going to find that Ted Cruz has a pretty good beachhead here,” said Jim Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas. “A significant share of the people that are attracted to Donald Trump for his iconoclastic approach to campaigning and politics are already predisposed toward Ted Cruz.”
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who was campaigning in Texas this week and who in February was running neck-and-neck with Cruz in the UT/Texas Tribune poll, has seen his fortunes wilt since Trump’s entry.
“Scott Walker is rapidly becoming, much to his chagrin, a cautionary tale of peaking too soon and getting caught up in the crosscurrents of Trump’s rise and the media storm around Trump,” Henson said.
But, Henson said, “I do not think that Donald Trump is hurting Ted Cruz in Texas. Trump is talking about the failure of government, of the establishment, this notion of American decline. This is all consistent with what Cruz wants this primary to be about. If those are the terms of the political discussion, Ted Cruz is fine with that.”
“People are looking for a fighter; they want someone storming the temple, knocking over the money-changers’ tables,” said Brendan Steinhauser, an Austin-based Republican political consultant who played a formative role in creating the national tea party movement.
In the end, Steinhauser thinks most conservative voters will pass on Trump: “I think they are going to settle on a legitimate contender like a Cruz, a Rubio, a Walker.”
And, Cruz said at Thursday’s rally, “I’ll tell you the difference between me and the other fine candidates on that debate stage. With me, when I tell you I’m going to do something, I’m going to do exactly what I say.
Title Cruz repudiates Obama, wows Fort Worth crowd found in The American Statesman
This article is driven by timeliness news value because the event took place Thursday so it happened very recently.
Proximity-
COMMUNITY NEWS
TRAVIS COUNTY
AUSTIN
Austin Water offers rebates
Austin Water is accepting applications through Sept. 30 for WaterWise Rainscape and WaterWise Landscape rebates.
Homeowners and schools could receive up to $500 for installing rainscapes that prevent runoff and reduce the need for additional irrigation; the minimum installation size is 100 square feet. Visit austintexas.gov/department/ waterwise-rainscape-rebate for more details.
Austin Water customers who replace healthy grass with native plant beds and permeable hardscapes may be eligible for up to $1,750 through the WaterWise Landscape rebate program. Residential properties could receive $35 for every 100 square feet; at least 500 square feet must be converted to be eligible for rebates. See austintexas.gov/department/water- wise-landscape-rebate . — AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Title Austin Water offers rebate found on The American StatesmanThis article is driven by the proximity news value because of its location taking place in the community and city I live in which is Austin.
Prominence-
SOUTH CAROLINA CHURCH SHOOTINGS
Shooting suspect to face death penalty
Killing of 9 people in a church called ‘the ultimate crime.’
By Meg Kinnard andJeffrey Collins Associated Press
CHARLESTON, S.C. — The white man accused of killing nine black churchgoers in what authorities said was a racially motivated crime during Bible study will face a death penalty trial, even though not all the victims’ families agree with capital punishment, a prosecutor said Thursday.
Solicitor Scarlett Wilson said Thursday that some crimes are so heinous they require the most serious punishment the state can give.
“This was the ultimate crime, and justice from our state calls for the ultimate punishment,” Wilson said, reading a three-minute statement outside her Charleston office. She took no questions.
Wilson filed paperwork saying she would seek the death penalty against 21-year-old Dylann Roof a few hours before her statement. Her reasons: More than two people were killed and others’ lives were put at risk.
Roof is charged under U.S. hate crime laws as well, and federal prosecutors haven’t decided if they will also seek the death penalty. Federal authorities have said Roof wrote online of fomenting racial violence and used racial slurs in a personal manuscript in which he decried integration.
Survivors also told police he used racial insults during the attack.
Wilson said she understands the desire of some victims’ families to forgive Roof and that some do not believe in the death penalty, but she said forgiveness doesn’t eliminate the consequences of Roof’s actions.
“Making such a weighty decision is an awesome responsibility,” Wilson said. “People who have already been victimized should not bear the burden of making the decisions on behalf of an entire community. They shouldn’t have to weigh the concerns of other people. They shouldn’t have to consider the facts of the case.”
Roof’s lawyers did not respond to Wilson’s decision.
Thursday’s motion doesn’t guarantee the case goes to trial. In a number of other murder cases in South Carolina, solicitors have filed notices to seek the death penalty and used them as bargaining chips to get a defendant to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison. Roof’s lawyers said in federal court July 31 that he would have been willing to plead guilty to the hate crimes charges, but he wanted to wait to see if prosecutors would want to put him to death.
In her filing, Wilson said she intends to present evidence on Roof’s mental state, adult and juvenile criminal record and other conduct, as well as his apparent lack of remorse for the killings.
Roof faces state charges including nine murder counts in the June 17 slayings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. He is expected in court again on those charges in October.
Public pressure and media attention on the case likely made it impossible for Wilson not to seek the death penalty, said Colin Miller, an expert on criminal law at the University of South Carolina School of Law.
“This has to be understood as part of a continuum,” he said. “In this case, likely this was viewed as the only acceptable path that was to be taken by the solicitor.”
Relatives of shooting victims spoke out at Roof’s first court appearance, saying they forgave him for his actions and prayed God would have mercy on him.
Wilson said she has met many times with survivors and families of shooting victims. She said their desires played into her ultimate decision, but that she appreciated that they all respected her decision to seek the death penalty.
“It’s definitely something a solicitor will take into account — the wishes of the family and what they desire in terms of how the case is going to proceed,” Miller said.
Andy Savage, a Charleston attorney who represents some of the survivors and victims’ families, commended Wilson for considering his clients’ thoughts on whether Roof should face death. Some of his clients may oppose the death penalty for religious reasons but also understood the decision was up to the state, Savage said.
Title Shooting suspect to face death penalty found on The American Statesman
This article is driven by prominence news value and it is news worthy because it was a tragic event in which a white man who was said was racially motivated went into a mostly black church and killed 9 black churchgoers which caused a outrage not only in the community but theses all over the United States who heard about the event.
Impact-
NEW DETAILS TEXAS TRUANCY LAWS
Skipping school no longer a crime
New state law clears thousands of criminal records for truancy.
By Claire Osborn cosborn@statesman.com
More than 2,000 criminal records of people charged with truancy vanished from a computer screen with a push of a button Thursday in Williamson County Justice of the Peace Bill Gravell’s courtroom.
Under a new state law, it is no longer a crime to skip school in Texas.
The law that took effect Tuesday changed truancy from a Class C misdemeanor to a civil matter.
That means students no longer face hefty fines or possibly jail or time at a juvenile detention facility for ditching classes.
It also means children and adults who have criminal records because of truancy will have their records expunged, meaning not only are the cases dropped, they won’t show up in court records.
Gravell asked Terra Tucker, a policy analyst for state Sen. John Whitmire, who helped get the bill passed, to press the delete button on Gravell’s computer at a court hearing the judge held to announce the expunction.
“This is a historic day,” said Gravell. “We are going to remove over 2,000 courts cases because it is the right thing to do for the kids of Texas.”
When he deleted the criminal records, some up to 20 years old, he also deleted $70,000 owed in outstanding fines and the suspension orders for 87 driver’s licenses in his precinct.
Gravell’s precinct covers Georgetown, northern Round Rock, Jarrell and Florence.
All four justices of the peace in Williamson County are expunging thousands of truancy records. Two of the five justices of the peace in Travis County who returned a request for comment were doing the same thing, according to their clerks.
The previous law, which has been in effect since the mid-1990s, made skipping school punishable by a fine of up to $500, the possible suspension of a driver’s license and, in some cases, jail for those ages 17 and older.
Under the new law, a judge has a variety of options, including ordering a juvenile to get mentoring, go to tutoring or perform community service.
School districts also have more opportunities to help students because they are no longer required to report as truant a student who has three unexcused absences in a four-week period, said Morgan Craven, director of the school-to-prison pipeline project for Texas Appleseed, a nonprofit justice organization.
Many students skip class because of personal problems or family issues, said Craven, who was at Gravell’s expunction hearing Thursday.
”We have kids who are homeless or they have transportation issues or chronic health issues,” she said.
Title Skipping school no longer a crime found on The American Statesman
This article is driven by impact news value because of how how it effects the students who do skip school that now no longer committed crime by doing so.
Conflict-
Hungary allows migrants on train
Decision to take them to camps met with outrage.
By Pablo Gorondi and Shawn Pogatchnik Associated Press
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY — Thousands of people desperate to reach Western Europe rushed into a Budapest train station Thursday after police ended a two-day blockade, setting off a wave of anger and confusion as hundreds shoved their way onto a waiting train.
But instead of taking them to prosperous Germany, where they hope to gain asylum, it tried to drop them off at a Hungarian camp for asylum seekers.
After the overloaded train halted at Bicske, site of one of the country’s five camps for asylum seekers, one man threw his wife and infant son onto the tracks, screaming in Arabic, “We won’t move from here!” Police surrounded the prone family, pulling the husband away and handcuffing him as he wailed.
Other migrants refused to budge, shouting their outrage and waving tickets they had purchased to Germany and Austria.
The scene of desperation was just one of many that unfolded Thursday as tempers flared in Hungary’s war of wills with the migrants, a showdown with consequences for the entire continent.
The nation’s anti-immigrant prime minister, Viktor Orban, warned that he intends to make his country’s borders an impassible fortress against new arrivals as his government struggled to coax its thousands of unwanted visitors away from the Budapest transportation hub that has become a squalid refugee camp for people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
At a meeting Thursday in Brussels, Obran and European Union leaders hotly debated the question of how to manage the crisis. Orban’s chief of staff, Janos Lazar, said 160,000 migrants had reached Hungary this year, 90,000 of them in the past two months alone.
“We Hungarians are full of fear,” Orban said at a news conference, warning that the acceptance of so many Muslims from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere would erode Europe’s Christian bedrock.
Orban confirmed his government’s plan to send at least 3,000 troops to Hungary’s southern border with Serbia, where police patrols, razor-wire coils and a 13-foot fence are already in place to deter new arrivals transiting through the non-EU member.
Title Hungary allows migrants on train found on The American Statesman
This article is driven by conflict news value because the story explains the conflict between thousands of migrants and Hungary's government.
Human Interest-
Syrian toddler’s death puts crisis in new light
ByLaura King and GlenJohnson LosAngelesTimes
ISTANBUL — The little boy on the beach had a name, and it was Aylan.
Searing images of the drowned Syrian toddler, his body washed ashore after the raft carrying his refugee family capsized off the Turkish coast, pricked consciences worldwide and galvanized passionate debate over the international response to the enormous tide of migrants arriving on Europe’s shores.
On Thursday — a day after photographs of the then-anonymous child being carried dead from the surf went viral online
— a fuller portrait emerged of a family rendered desperate by fighting in their hometown, Kobani, and their slender hope of finding refuge in Canada.
The family was called Kurdi, and 3-year-old Aylan, sometimes called by the Kurdish variant Alan, drowned along with his 5-year-old brother, Galip, and their mother, Reyhana. The child’s father, Abdullah, survived to break the terrible news by phone to relatives at home and abroad, plunging even their loss-racked Syrian hometown into mourning.
“My kids were the most beautiful children in the world, wonderful. They wake me up every morning to play with them. They are all gone now,” he said Thursday as he awaited the release of their bodies from a morgue.
The haunting episode put an unforgettably human face to the tragedies at sea that have killed more than 2,500 migrants and refugees this year, many of them Syrians fleeing a civil war that has raged since 2011. Tens of thousands more are on an arduous trek across Europe, making their way through fields and cities and across barbed-wire border fences to try to reach one of the wealthier northern nations such as Germany or Sweden.
Propelled by the grim and graphic images, the story of Aylan and his family was front-page news across Europe, provoking particular soul-searching in Britain, which has taken in only a fraction of the 800,000 migrants Germany expects to receive this year. The London-based Independent published the pictures, along with a strongly worded editorial headlined: “Somebody’s Child.”
“If these extraordinarily powerful images of a dead Syrian child washed up on a beach don’t change Europe’s attitude to refugees, what will?” it asked.
Aid workers, even those faced daily with harrowing scenes of hardship, groped for words to characterizeWednesday’s tragedy at sea. Yet such sinkings have become commonplace; more than 150 people drowned off the coast of Libya last week.
“It is unacceptable that we have children dying like this in the 21st century,” said Lado Gvilava, the Turkey chief of mission for the International Organization for Migration. “It’s hard to see how this can be allowed to happen.”Title Syrian toddlers death puts crisis in new light found on the American Statesman
This article is driven by the human interest new value because the story explains how the emotional struggle of the father and the people who read the story due to the death of a 3 year old and his mother and young brother.
Novelty-
Untitled Ad on Page A4 of Friday, September 04, 2015 issue of Austin American Statesman
(this article only came in picture form)
Title The official 2015 ACL festival found on The American Statesman
This story is driven by novelty news value because it is a huge unusual music festival in Austin that a large amount of people take interest to.
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